Related Terms

Examples of descriptive statistics in the following topics:

Descriptivestatistics and inferential statistics are both important components of statistics when learning about a population.

Descriptivestatistics is the discipline of quantitatively describing the main features of a collection of data, or the quantitative description itself.

Descriptivestatistics are distinguished from inferential statistics in that descriptivestatistics aim to summarize a sample, rather than use the data to learn about the population that the sample of data is thought to represent.

This generally means that descriptivestatistics, unlike inferential statistics, are not developed on the basis of probability theory.

Even when a data analysis draws its main conclusions using inferential statistics, descriptivestatistics are generally also presented.

The standard error is the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of a statistic.

However, the mean and standard deviation are descriptivestatistics, whereas the mean and standard error describes bounds on a random sampling process.

Despite the small difference in equations for the standard deviation and the standard error, this small difference changes the meaning of what is being reported from a description of the variation in measurements to a probabilistic statement about how the number of samples will provide a better bound on estimates of the population mean, in light of the central limit theorem.

Quantitative techniques are the set of statistical procedures that yield numeric or tabular output.

There are also many statistical tools generally referred to as graphical techniques which include:

Below are brief descriptions of some of the most common plots:

Histogram: In statistics, a histogram is a graphical representation of the distribution of data.

Box plot: In descriptivestatistics, a boxplot, also known as a box-and-whisker diagram, is a convenient way of graphically depicting groups of numerical data through their five-number summaries (the smallest observation, lower quartile (Q1), median (Q2), upper quartile (Q3), and largest observation).

As one would expect, statistics is largely grounded in mathematics, and the study of statistics has lent itself to many major concepts in mathematics, such as:

It includes descriptivestatistics (the study of methods and tools for collecting data, and mathematical models to describe and interpret data) and inferential statistics (the systems and techniques for making probability-based decisions and accurate predictions based on incomplete data).

Statistics itself also provides tools for predicting and forecasting the use of data and statistical models.

Statistical methods date back at least to the 5th century BC.

In this book, Al-Kindi provides a detailed description of how to use statistics and frequency analysis to decipher encrypted messages.